Expressive mechanisms for equitable rent division on a budget

TL;DR

This paper examines envy-free rent division mechanisms that consider budget constraints and reports, analyzing their incentive properties and conditions for truthful outcomes in roommate scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for envy-free rent division mechanisms that incorporate budget constraints and characterizes their incentive compatibility under bounded budget violations.

Findings

Envy-free mechanisms can be incentive-compatible with bounded budget violations.

Complete information outcomes align with true preferences under certain bounds.

The study provides conditions for truthful reporting in rent division with budgets.

Abstract

We study the incentive properties of envy-free mechanisms for the allocation of rooms and payments of rent among financially constrained roommates. Each agent reports her values for rooms, her housing earmark (soft budget), and an index that reflects the difficulty the agent experiences from having to pay over this amount. Then an envy-free allocation for these reports is recommended. The complete information non-cooperative outcomes of each of these mechanisms are exactly the envy-free allocations with respect to true preferences if and only if the admissible budget violation indices have a bound.